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The Good Daughter

You wrote the libretto for your first opera, “The Bonesetter’s
Daughter,” which will have its premiere at the San Francisco Opera next month and is based on your novel of the same name.
What led you to take up opera? It started on my 50th birthday, in a way,
when my friend Stewart Wallace composed two pages based on the first three lines
of the book as a birthday present. Stewart ended up pushing me into the opera.

“The Bonesetter’s Daughter,” not unlike your other novels,
tells the story of an anxious American woman and her overbearing Chinese mother.
How much of it is autobiographical? I had a wonderful mother. And she was
supportive of everything I did. From the beginning, she said I could become
a homeless person.

Very funny. I had a very demanding mother. I thought I disappointed
her in every single way. She wanted me to be a concert pianist, and that would
be on weekends. My day job would be brain surgeon. It’s kind of ironic
that my mother wanted me to be a brain surgeon, because our family had so many
neurological diseases.

Yes, your father and your brother both died of brain tumors when you were in your teens. My mother ended up with
Alzheimer’s,
and I have had my own problems with Lyme disease.

So she was right. You should have been a neurosurgeon. I could have
operated on myself.

Was she pleased by “The Joy Luck Club,” which came out in 1989 and, in retrospect,
seems to have signaled the beginning of an endless flow of novels about the
immigrant experience in America? When I was on the New York Times best-seller list, at No. 4, I told my mother, and she said:
“Wha’ happened? Who’s No. 3 and 2 and 1?”

What do you think of “The Good Earth,” by Pearl Buck, which was one of my favorite
novels as a child and made it seem as if Chinese people were all hardworking?
It was a great book, but there were people who said, Well, because of this one
book, and because Pearl Buck won the Nobel Prize, now people think that all Chinese people wore these coolie
hats and gave birth to babies in the field.

Photo

Amy TanCredit
Jason Madara

I see that PEN is scheduled to sponsor a rally the week this interview appears
in support of the 45 dissident writers jailed in China.
Are you considering participating? No. We have to think whether our actions
on American soil will have the effect we hope on foreign soil, or whether they
will be counterproductive. A lot of the protests denouncing China have been
counterproductive.

In that case, what should be done about China’s woeful record on human
rights? It’s a conundrum. You want to make inroads without creating
landslides.

Do you plan to watch any of the Olympics events? Probably only if my
husband happens to have the TV on.

What about women’s gymnastics? No, it makes me anxious.

You’re worried someone will fall off the balance beam? Exactly.
It awakens my own anxiety
about performance. When I was 6 years old, I made a mistake during a piano recital,
and the audience began to laugh. I fled the stage crying, and it traumatized
me forever.

Isn’t writing a kind of performance? No. It’s a meditation.
It does not have to do with personal humiliation until after it gets done. Later
on people will vilify you. But I don’t have to read those reviews.

For all your supposed performance anxiety, you do play the tambourine in
the Rock Bottom Remainders, which includes Stephen King, Matt Groening and other rock-star wannabes. It’s a charity band?
I think we have raised more than $2 million for literacy programs.

Why do you play the tambourine instead of the piano after all your years
of lessons? Chopin is not what you play when you’re in a rock band.